Iron Man Cometh
Iron Man
Jet powered, indestructible and freezing on winter mornings
If you don’t know your superheroes, you might have glanced at Iron Man and had him down as a dull robot-faced crime fighter. He’s actually one of Marvel’s coolest characters - a billionaire playboy genius with a ’70s ‘stache, an eye for the ladies and a heart of actual steel. And that’s before Tony Stark puts on his self-designed flying armour and becomes the Invincible Iron Man. Beat that Peter Parker with your poorly paid photojournalism and annoying girlfriends. Next month’s big budget Iron Man film looks promising enough to attract the worldwide love old shellhead deserves. Exclusively seeing the game of the movie in action at Marvel’s disappointingly not top-secret New York HQ was enough to make us think that he’s also got potential as a videogame hero.
Sega developers Secret Level have gone for all out military action here - it’s probably best thought of as a flying shooter along the lines of Ace Combat, only minus the cumbersome plane of course. Although the training levels in the Mk 1 and Mk 2 suits have you flame-throwering enemies on the ground, for most of the game your jet boots will be thrusting you across huge open landscapes and into battle with fighter planes, attack choppers, tanks and the giant armoured supervillian, Power Monger.
The plot follows the film closely in updating the original comic book origin of Iron Man. When he’s kidnapped and forced to make a devastating weapon, Tony Stark ‘does an A-Team’ (ask your Dad) and instead welds together an armoured suit allowing him to escape. Uncovering a dastardly global domination plan he decides to upgrade his armour and don it again to save the world.
This progression of increasingly badass suits of armor is followed in the game. Your first suit, the Mk 1, is a bit Tin Man meets nightclub bouncer. But you try creating techno armour while held hostage in Afghanistan! Necessarily crude, the silver prototype does feature some decent flame-throwers useful for escaping from terrorists. Back home, Tony comes up with a nicer sleek silver suit featuring limited flying capabilities that you can test out in the second training level. This is actually the Silver Centurion armour though, a souped-up version of the suit from Iron Man issue 200! The final armour has even better flying capabilities and comes fully loaded with weaponry. Best of all, red and gold go together. Glimpsed in the game trailer, the Stealth armour allowed Iron Man to camouflage himself in the comic books, Metal Gear Solid 4-style, although we’re not sure exactly when you’ll be able to use it.
Stark might just be a rich bloke in a metal suit but even in the game’s explosion-filled hostile airspace, Iron Man looked far from vulnerable. You can switch on the afterburners and blaze across the sky, hover to fire his gauntlet-mounted Repulsors against ground targets, wrestle helicopters and unleash his chest based Unibeam. Stark’s armour will be upgradable as you progress with a power management system letting you unleash a variety of attacks.
While what we’ve seen so far suggests it probably doesn’t have the variety to trouble the Spider-Man games, it should pulverise the inferior likes of Superman Returns. Visually it looked as shiny and polished as the Mk 3 suit itself, even when throwing the arsenal of an entire air force at our hero. The cool thing is, being Iron Man, he was able to catch the missiles and throw them back!
